Hard drive: Seagate ships strongest security self-encrypting storage

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 13 March 2007 18:48

Your IT - Entertainment

Also included is the previously mentioned Wave Systems security suite. The full title of this software is “Wave Systems Embassy Security Center’s Trusted Drive Manager”, or simply Trusted Drive Manager, which is used to simplify the setup and configuration of Seagate’s new drives.

Seagate says that Trusted Drive Manager “makes it easy for administrators and users to create and back up passwords, and for administrators to control hard drive policies and security settings”. The software takes advantage of Seagate’s “DriveTrust Technology”, which is designed “to allow administrators to instantly and easily erase all data cryptographically so the drive can be safely redeployed or discarded”.

Seagate also tell us that “DriveTrust Technology is a powerful new security platform that combines strong, fully automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organization-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest”.

So, it looks like the notebook hard drive of the future has gotten a whole lot harder to crack, which will keep government organizations, corporations and spies happy, although you do have to wonder if Seagate have a back door to allow government officials to crack open the hard drives of suspected pedophiles who may think that this technology will protect them from having their dark secrets discovered.

Whatever the case may be on that issue, the need for strong hardware based encryption in today’s data driven world is clear, and now it’s possible to buy a hard drive that does exactly that. No doubt Seagate’s competitors are also hard at work on such technology and will make similar announcements of their own in the not-too distant future.

In related news, Seagate has also announced the world's first 7200-RPM notebook PC hard drive with free-fall protection for beefed-up laptop durability. The drive offers 160Gb of storage space thanks to perpendicular recording technology, uses the ATA 3.0 Gbit/second interface and uses an ‘optional’ free-fall sensor to park the drive head off the disc to protect contact with the platter upon impact after a free fall of as little as 8 inches. It does this by  detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity.

For more information on both new drives, please visit www.seagate.com.